Social networking platform Bluesky has unveiled a new utility called ‘Find Friends,’ which allows users to securely upload and match contact information to see which of their real life contacts are also on Bluesky.
The company says the objective is to restore a core element of early social media by helping people build meaningful connections without exposing their personal data to unnecessary risk.
In recent years, many social networks have struggled with the balance between making it convenient to find friends and keeping user information private. Platforms often encourage users to import phone contacts, but this has sometimes led to phone numbers getting leaked, targeted by spammers, or mishandled by services.
Bluesky’s approach aims to avoid these problems by structuring the Find Friends process around mutual consent and enhanced encryption. The way Find Friends works is straightforward user opt in. When someone chooses to use the tool, they enter and verify their phone number and then upload their contact list from their device. Bluesky then checks to see if any of those contacts have also opted in and go through the same verification process.
Only when both people in a pair have done this and are in each other’s address books will Bluesky reveal the match and suggest friendship connections. This double opt in design makes it impossible for someone to be found through another person’s contact upload unless they have chosen to participate themselves.
Bluesky has made the security of its users’ information a central tenet of Find Friends. Rather than storing plain phone numbers, the company hashes contact pairs. Hashing is a method of transforming data into a form that cannot easily be reversed, and by combining each user’s number with each contact’s number, the resulting encrypted values are far more secure.
On top of that, this data is tied to hardware security keys rather than being kept directly in the platform’s main database. Users who later change their mind about sharing their contacts can remove the data and disable the feature at any time.
Bluesky says that because the feature is new, early adopters may see only a few matches at first. As more of a user’s contacts join and opt in, connections should appear more quickly via in app notifications.
The rollout of Find Friends will begin with mobile users in a dozen countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden.
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